Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

The fragmentation of biopharmaceutical innovation

  1. Katarzyna Smietana

    1. McKinsey & Company, Wroclaw, Poland.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  2. David Quigley

    1. McKinsey & Company, New York, NY, USA.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  3. Bart Van de Vyver

    1. McKinsey & Company, Geneva, Switzerland.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  4. Martin Møller

    1. McKinsey & Company, Copenhagen, Denmark.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

In the pharmaceutical industry, there are typically 50–120 consolidative deals each year through which two companies become a single entity (Fig. 1). So, it could be reasonable to assume that the industry is consolidating over time. However, in this article we present data that indicate that this is not the case. We also analyse the drivers and discuss the implications for the industry.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 19, 17-18 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41573-019-00046-3

Acknowledgements

The authors thank A. Halczuk for help with some of the analyses.

Updates & Corrections

  • Update 29 April 2019: The article has been updated to include a reference to a previous study on fragmentation in the biopharmaceutical industry by Goldsmith and Varela (Drug Discov. Today 22, 433–439; 2017).

Supplementary Information

  1. Supplementary Box 1

Competing Interests

All authors of this article are employees of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy that works with the world's leading biopharmaceutical companies on innovation issues. The analysis in this study was funded by McKinsey's Pharmaceuticals and Medical Products practice and undertaken independently of any other organizations.

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links